Case 1 – Funnyhouse of a Negro

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playwrights, Adrienne Kennedy and Amiri Baraka, that are enclosed within the play-scripts of Funnyhouse of a Negro and Slave Ship, two plays that provoked heated debates in the 1960’s. Although politically, esthetically, and psychologically different, Kennedy and Baraka share the same approach to stage directions. Both Slave Ship and Funnyhouse are filled with lengthy descriptions of the non-verbal actions, detailed property and light plots and scenography changes. Both plays have formal introductions by the authors who give detailed instruction on every technical aspect of the production, e.g. how actors should behave, what ought to be included in the interpretation of the play’s script, and what should on no occasion be attempted by any director or actor.

A single foretaste of the stage directions provokes a reflection that both dramatists are unyielding to the director’s autonomous interpretation. Statistics provide an even more astounding discovery: stage directions in Kennedy’s play constitute 35%

of the entire text, and in Amiri Baraka’s script the percentage grows to an astonishing 62%. This inevitably suggests that the authors intend to seize the dominant position in the author – director power relationship. Similarly, actors, instead of being considered artists free to interpret the characters, seem to be reduced to puppet-like and passive impersonators. One might ask: why did the authors decide to verbalize their intentions to such an extent?

The answer seems to lie hidden within the play-scripts themselves.

2.1.Case 1 – Funnyhouse of a Negro

In 1964, Adrienne Kennedy became an overnight sensation of the off-Broadway theaters. Her first play, Funnyhouse of a Negro¹ left the audiences and theater critics in an unusual emotional state. Although it was

1 All quotations from the play script are marked as FN.

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immediately recognized as a very potent play, the playwright received a wide array of criticism, from very positive to extremely negative.

Adrienne Kennedy was particularly careful in constructing the world of Funnyhouse of a Negro. In agreement with the structural elements of any drama, she begins her play with the list of characters, yet to understand the manner in which she creates the characters and what the actors impersonating them must achieve, she must provide detailed information. Therefore the play-script, besides the listed characters, contains the following author’s note:

Funnyhouse of a Negro is perhaps clearest and most explicit when the play is placed in the girl Sarah's room. The center of the stage works well as her room, allowing the rest of the stage as the place for herself.

Her room should have a bed, a writing table, and a mirror. Near her bed is the statue of Queen Victoria; other objects might be her photographs and her books. When she is placed in her room with her belongings, then the director is free to let the rest of the play happen around her (FN: 4).

The director thus discovers who the main character is, what the referential system between the characters and places is, and whose relations are the most intense. Thus, even before the stage production is taken into consideration, Sarah becomes the point of focus and reference to the remaining characters. Later, the relationship of particular selves of Sarah’s and their attachment to each other is explored in minute detail. Out of her four selves, three are associated with whiteness: Queen Victoria, Duchess of Hapsburg and Jesus, only Patrice Lumumba is black. From the first scene the stage directions point to the nature of the relationship between these characters: queen, duchess and Jesus spend some time together, they communicate with each other and exchange caresses, and they leave

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Patrice Lumumba aside. Kennedy to a great extent constructs her dramatis personae according to their symbolic significance. Scenography is conceptualized in an analogous manner. Sometimes a crowd on stage represents several persons, in a different scene one character is presented by more characters and shifts its personality from one dramatis persona to another from scene to scene, and finally, a character may be a disguise of a soul in a foreign body. In the Funnyhouse of a Negro, Sarah is one of three actual human characters, yet, because of her being split into four selves, viewers witness a group of personality manifestation characters on stage, a crowd with a startling unity. All this moulds into a peculiar world somewhere between the reality and imagination where the living, the imagined and the dead have equal rights to torment one another, where it is even difficult to distinguish between those who are dead, imagined and those alive. There is also a prominent similarity of the three Sarah’s white alter egos: they all have non-Caucasian wild kinky hair that continues to fall out, and by the end of the play all these characters are bald. This symbolic action points to the acculturation, the final loss of the unwanted racial identity, but also to the personal distress of these characters, elevated to the level of a symbol or metaphor, to be performed on stage. A mulatto who does not accept the African American heritage is thus able to pretend they are fully white. Hair, however, also becomes a signifier of womanhood and beauty – queen and duchess, and of a religious icon – Jesus. A bald woman is less womanly, a bald queen is less royal and bald Jesus is a blasphemy.

Besides Sarah herself, there is also a character of Sarah’s mother, largely reduced to a pantomimic aspect of mise-en-scene. It is an extremely reduced character in Funnyhouse. She appears on stage only twice, but is a crucial referential to other characters.

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Yet, the basic source of knowledge about her lies in the stage directions. In fact, she appears to have two heads: the beautiful pale-faced one, with long, straight black hair, sitting firmly on her shoulders – the beautiful face Sarah remembers from her childhood – and the bald one that she carries in front of her, to which she speaks about her misery of marrying a Black Man – the face Sarah saw after her mother became insane and after she had lost her hair.

Mother is a thought concept which becomes embodied on stage which may only be attributable to stage directions, an image taken either out of Sarah’s imagination or presupposed memory. For Sarah, she is an object of admiration, of perfection that is very hard to be achieved. At the same time the mother figure has the quality of a shape taken out of the worst nightmares that could haunt many African Americans in the mid twentieth century – of somebody who could pass for a white woman and lost her opportunity in life by attachment to/ being trapped in Blackness.

The minute details Adrienne Kennedy provides in stage directions result in instilling specific images of particular dramatis personae which are non-negotiable in play-for-stage adaptation process. For instance, the Landlady, one of the two white characters that are not formed in Sarah’s mind is described as:

(…) a tall, thin, white woman dressed in a black and red hat and appears to be talking to someone in a suggested open doorway in a corridor of a rooming house. She laughs like a mad character in a funnyhouse throughout her speech (FN: 10).

Kennedy enforces an image, a metaphor not only embedded in aesthetic valuation (circus colors and aesthetic), but also heavily burdened with ideological/ political/ social predilection. Metaphors, in the case of Kennedy’s theatrical idiom, are not only formed by words the characters utter. They are also an

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outcome of the already imposed symbolism of mise-en-scene elements. In Funnyhouse characters’ dialogues and monologues are further complicated by the changes in the scenography – places become more than a fixed space on stage: a room is also a jungle and a palace – which allows the process of illocution to attain numerous layers of meaning.

Kennedy, a student of Albee’s workshop, limited the number of colors in the scenography which marked a deeper and more complex reference to symbolic actions of the characters. The three colors: black, red and white, are discussed in detail in the didascalia and their interpretation is key factor in the understanding of the play. Thanks to them the analysis allows the portrayal of Sarah, the main character and a mulatto, whose selves range from white queen and duchess, through a yellow (mulatto?) Jesus, to black Lumumba, who is fascinated with whiteness and repulsed by blackness and who builds her own mythology based on color. For her, her white mother is a deity, but also a ghost that haunts her. Her black father, who keeps returning and is beastly, is a nightmare she cannot free herself of. But the play is not a simple hailing of the white and rebuffing of the black, it is a detailed analysis of complex relationships of a tragic mulatto, who love/hates both parents, and the nature of colors (white – ugly, ghastly, rat-gnawed, red – blood-like, sensual, violent, sacrificial, black – beastly, ravens, deathly) described in the stage directions in detail only serves to further limit the freedom of artistic interpretation of the main character.

The limitation established on the number of colors used in the scenography conveys a startling effect when another element imposed on the performing crew – strong white light – adjoins it. The colors are suddenly intense, but, as the author describes it in the stage directions, extremely ugly. In the scene in

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Raymond’s room the audience must put their trust in what they hear rather than in what they see.

Adrienne Kennedy defines the technical aspects of the production as well. She devises the shutters which hide mirrors positioned so as to reflect the light and blind the audience whenever Raymond-impersonator opens and closes them at his will.

Each gesture an actor is obliged to take, each pose becomes a kind of sign, still expanding the number of possible readings of the text by the audience. Yet the gestures are to be vivid and clear since they are limited to the minimum by the stage directions. In this manner Adrienne Kennedy changes actors into puppets set in the slow-motion reality of Sarah’s mind. All this amounts to the effect of some unreal, though somehow familiar world, in which ideas are blurred to the extreme, reaching the point after which it is not possible to discern where the symbol is born, how it develops and what it results in, since Kennedy is far from being static in her understanding of the African American idiom.